Esther J. Cepeda: Betsy DeVos may be the least of public education’s worries

Tuesday

Feb 21, 2017 at 8:00 PM

Newly confirmed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos may just be the most reviled woman in America today.

Protesters recently blocked her from walking in through the front door of a Washington, D.C., school. She’s been accused of being too rich and privileged to comprehend public education and mocked for being concerned about the threat of grizzly bears on school grounds.

Critics have seized on a 2015 DeVos speech in Texas during which she said: “It’s a battle of Industrial Age versus the Digital Age. It’s the Model T versus the Tesla. It’s old factory model versus the new Internet model. It’s the Luddites versus the future. ... We are the beneficiaries of start-ups, ventures, and innovation in every other area of life, but we don’t have that in education because it’s a closed system, a closed industry, a closed market. It’s a monopoly, a dead end. ... As long as education remains a closed system, we will never see the education equivalents of Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Wikipedia or Uber. We won’t see any real innovation that benefits more than a handful of students.”

That’s not the most charitable description of an education system that trained the people who got us to the moon and helped invent some of the most disruptive technologies in the history of mankind.

Still, the tech darlings of Silicon Valley have been preaching this very same gospel for years — to much applause and lip service about our children getting a 19th-century education in preparation for a 21st-century reality.

In “Most Likely to Succeed,” a 2015 book and documentary about “re-imagining school” by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith, the current education system is trashed thusly: “While education credentials were historically aligned with competencies that mattered, they have become prohibitively expensive, emotionally damaging, and disconnected from anything essential.”

And then there’s the argument about DeVos being radically anti-public school because of her stances on school choice, vouchers and charter schools — even though those stances clearly resemble her Democratic predecessors’.

Arne Duncan, the education secretary under President Barack Obama and former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools — who was himself criticized for never having been a teacher, but didn’t inspire the kind of bitter hatred that DeVos has spurred — wasn’t significantly different.

As Duncan’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, recently noted in an editorial: “Duncan, too, wasn’t satisfied with incremental or illusory student gains. He wanted students in poorly performing schools to have access to better ones. He wanted educators held accountable for their students’ learning — and paid extra for superior performance. ... Duncan, you recall, tried to reform public education. He pioneered the innovative Race to the Top competition, giving districts incentives to improve. He led a charge to allow more charter schools and tie teacher evaluations to student advancement. Oh, how the teachers unions loathed that.”

(For that matter, Duncan’s successor, John King, was also charter school friendly.)

As I’ve polled my education colleagues, the consensus seems to be that the ire against DeVos is less about education views than about the power her boss, President Donald Trump, and the Republican-controlled Congress will wield over schools.

“But the education secretary just does not play a big, federal role in education, it’s more of a matter of having the bully pulpit to use,” noted Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a reform organization that worked along with the Department of Education and other teacher-education stakeholders for seven years on teacher-preparation guidelines. The Senate is now considering a bill passed by the House to overturn all their hard work.

“We always knew that the final regulations would not make it through a Republican-majority Congress,” Walsh told me. “For [big education reforms], you have to have a lever that is not governmental. Arne Duncan was very much an activist secretary and he had $5 billion to fight with, but a lot of the work he cared about was left undone. We’re in a different era now — and this was not going to be an activist period from a federal perspective, no matter who was in that seat.”

There’s certainly plenty to fret about in public education — student poverty, poor teacher-preparation programs and an overly politicized policy atmosphere, for starters. But in the grand scheme of things, DeVos is probably the least of our worries.

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